Search the GTU

Join the GTU's Center for the Arts & Religion (CARe) for a new monthly event at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
On the third Thursday of each month, we'll gather in the lobby at BAMPFA at 4:30 to hear a short talk about a piece of artwork currently on display, and then we can amble around the museum or enjoy a drink in the cafe.
To inaugurate the series this month, our first guide will be Prof. Devin Zuber (CSS/GTU), who will speak about George Innes's "The Brook."
GTU Students, staff, faculty, and friends are all welcome.
Where: Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific...

The Graduate Theological Union and the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education are excited to announce a new partnership with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. As part of this partnership, a group of GTU faculty members will host a panel discussion following an upcoming performance of Head of Passes, a new play by MacArthur Genius award winner Tarell Alvin McCraney that is based in part on the Book of Job. The play runs at the Berkeley Rep from April 10 through May 24; details on the date of the GTU panel will be announced soon.
In the meantime, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre is offering a...

Brown Bag Lunch Series
Presented by: Suchi Lin (PhD candidate, GTU, with a concentration on art and mission)
Title: Who do you Say that I Am?: Jesus Christ in Visual Art
Through centuries, artistic portraits of Christ have been produced in different cultural and missiological contexts. This BBL talk introduces the cultural representation of Jesus Christ made by contemporary artists, with an attempt to address a Christology of the images from an intercultural approach.​
RSVP on Eventbrite!

Berkeley, CA – October 3, 2018 The Center for the Arts & Religion at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) celebrates the publication of Gestures to the Divine: Reflections on Eco-Spirituality, a book that brings together the nature-focused artwork of Hagit Cohen and reflections on eco-spirituality by scholars from the GTU. The release accompanies the exhibition of Cohen’s work at the GTU’s Doug Adams Gallery in Berkeley through December 13, 2018.
Hagit Cohen’s minimalist prints of plant seeds and pods inspire awe and contemplation. As she explains, “nothing is too small to be the object of...

The Center for Arts and Religion would like to invite you to their first Brown Bag Lunch event for Spring 2016. On February 5th from 12-1pm, Yohana Junker, a GTU doctoral student in Art & Religion and Fall 2015 CARE Grant Awardee, will be presenting a talk entitled, "Aspects of Awe, Wonder, and Spirituality in the Landscape Paintings of Georgia O'Keefe."This event is free and open to the public; please bring your lunch and join us!
When: February 5th 12-1pm
Where Doug Adams Gallery, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave, Berkeley, CA 94709

Artists’ TalkMining the Collection: Finding Meaning in the Mess
In CARE’s Doug Adams Gallery
Guest Speakers: Judith Selby Lang & Richard Lang
Moderator: Lydia Brawner
Featuring a performance by Bob Marsh
Co-sponsored by the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology
Since 1999, the Langs have been visiting Point Reyes National Seashore, gathering plastic debris as it washes out of the Pacific Ocean. Like archaeologists, the Langs carefully collect and organize these artifacts of our time. The Langs’ prints stand on their own as beautiful and arresting artworks; the surprise is in the realization...

Want to learn more about the fascinating and colorful world of liturgical vesture? Come to the gallery and chat with Khouria Krista West, an ecclesiastical tailor of Eastern Orthodox vestments based in Portland, Orgeon. Committeed to continuing the millennia-old tradition of high-quality vestments into the 21st century, Kh. Krista will be joining us remotely from her tailor's workshop, giving a behind-the-scenes tour of the space in which moden vestments are still hand-crafted to this day.
Join us in CARe's Doug Adams Gallery, 2465 Le Conte Avenue, Berkeley.

Film Screening at JST and special Q&A with Annie O’Neil - pilgrim and co-director! It is a must-see for anyone interested in pilgrimage or the Way of Saint James - as the New York Times proclaimed, “Viewer beware: The impulse to take a hike is strong. Wear sturdy shoes.”
The evening kicks off with a liturgy at 5:15 pm and a simple soup supper starting around 6:00pm – or feel free to just come along for the film and discussion beginning at 6:45.
The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Art, Religion, and Education and is free & open to all.

Prayer-tivity: Unleashing the power of your creative process in understanding, experiencing, and practicing prayer
When you pray, what do you experience? Would you like to go deeper, stronger, wider? Would you like the words to sing, to dance, to spring off the page in iridescent form? Those of us who pray often do so within a certain established context, with traditional words that are familiar and comforting, and can perhaps become a little static. We often take these texts at face value. However, within the texts of prayers, each word is a bud waiting to be unfurled, a world that...

The Graduate Theological Union, along with the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, invite you to join us for a discussion following the May 14, 2015 performance of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Head of Passes, which is based in part on the Book of Job.
The discussion will occur in the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s cafe following the performance and include a panel of experts, including:
· Dr. LeAnn Snow Flesher, Academic Dean and Professor of Old Testament, American Baptist Seminary of the West
· Dr. James A....

Support our exhibitions, courses, and other programs by becoming a CARe Member!
For a tax-deductible donation of $100 or more, benefits include:
​Free admission to members-only previews and receptions
Invitations to special lectures, parties, and tours
Discounts on selected local arts-related programs
Monthly updates via the CARe Members’ newsletter
Membership to the North American Reciprocal Museum Association, giving you and a friend free admission to over 1000 museums around the country, many in the Bay Area
A beautiful catalog from our Fall exhibition, Gestures to the Divine,...

From the Fall 2016 issue of Currents, view PDF
By Elizabeth S. Peña
Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. —Gerhard Richter
The arts—literature, dance, music, and the visual arts—enhance religious experience and evoke transcendence. Artistic expression often provides common ground for scholars and practitioners representing a wide variety of faith traditions. In the classroom the arts offer entry into complex concepts and philosophies. These are just a few of the reasons why the...

The Hermitage of Landscape, the opening exhibit at the NEW Doug Adams Gallery (2465 LeConte Ave., Berkeley) will feature the luminous landscape paintings of Bay Area artist Nicholas Coley. Painting en plein aire, Coley experiments with light and shape, producing images that range from realism to abstraction. Familiar Bay Area sites – Mt. Tam, Baker Beach, Tennessee Valley, the Berkeley Hills – take on other-wordly qualities.
The exhibition runs from August 30 to December 9.
The artist will be present at the opening reception on September 6 at 5:00 pm to discuss his work. The reception will...

Doug Adams Gallery (inside the Badè Museum of Biblical Archeology), Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley
Each year, an artist is invited by the Doug Adams Gallery to create a body of work inspired by the Badè Museum of Biblical Archeology, and its collection of objects spanning a period of 3,000 years. The artist-in-residence gains access to the entire Badè collection, and, in consultation with museum staff, conducts research that informs their final exhibition. The Mining The Collection series fosters cross-disciplinary dialogue...

by Arthur Holder
from Currents Fall 2015
Responding to the changing landscapes of the academy and the wider society, the GTU has created an innovative approach to doctoral education that features new opportunities for interdisciplinary scholarship and interreligious conversation. Students who enter the PhD and ThD programs at the GTU in fall 2016 will be able to take advantage of this new approach. The curriculum recently adopted by the Core Doctoral Faculty builds on the historic strengths of the GTU while making the doctoral program more responsive to the diverse research interests and...

The Graduate Theological Union community mourns the loss of Jane Dillenberger, Professor Emerita of Theology and the Arts, who died at her home in Berkeley on November 11 at the age of 98.
A pioneer in the dialogue between religion and modern art, Professor Dillenberger was trained as an art historian at the University of Chicago and Harvard. During the course of her long career, she taught courses in art and religion at Drew University, the GTU, San Francisco Theological Seminary, Pacific School of Religion, Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, the Dominican School of Philosophy and...

After gathering in the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive lobby at 4:30pm, we'll hear a short talk about an artwork on display. Then, we can amble around the museum and/or go have a drink in the café! Check in the a CARe staff member for a complimentary ticket. Presenter: TBA GTU students, faculty, and friends are all welcome. BAMPFA is located at 2155 Center Street, between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue, in downtown Berkeley.

Justin Tannis, Managing Director of the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies in Religion & Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion, will lead an examination of three HIV+ artists, Juan Gonzalez, Albert Winn, and David Wojnarowicz and the ways in which their work embodies the efforts to make the suffering of those impacted by HIV/AIDS visible. Doug Adams Gallery, 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley, CA
Download Flyer

Tantric Polyamory in Hollywood
Michelle Mueller, Ph.D, GTU, CARe Fall 2015 Grant Recipient
Michelle received a CARe grant to participate in a class with her research informant, KamalaDevi McClure. KamalaDevi is from the cast of Showtime's Polyamory: Married and Dating and is the author of several books on Western Tantra and polyamory. The class was "How To Write A Book in 90 Days," and Michelle will tell you how she did just that (approximately), as well as reading a section from her completed work, the dissertation, "Performed Polygamy and Polyamory in the Media Age: An Ethnography of...

Discussion of Aesthetic Iconography as it Relates to Death
Presenter: Jim Sienkiewicz, CARe Writing Prize Recipient, Fall 2015, second year Art & Religion PhD Student in West African Art & Religion, GTU
In this talk Jim Sienkiewicz discusses the artistic use of iconography related to mortality. Beginning with an analysis of printmaker Anne Tait's 2015 exhibition at the Doug Adams gallery, a further engagement of photographic and contemporary artistic investigations of death as an aesthetic and conceptual theme will be explored.
RSVP ON EVENTBRITE

An institution of higher learning unlike any other, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley brings together scholars of the world’s diverse religions and wisdom traditions to advance new knowledge, share inspiration, and collaborate on solutions.